The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard

Annotation (by Artie Samplaski):

This is the book form of the 1973 Norton Lectures, given by Bernstein; video and LP
recordings of the lecture series were also released. Bernstein's main concern was to discuss
the crisis of music in the twentieth century caused by the abandonment of tonality as the
primary organizing force (a viewpoint for which he was villified). His starting point, however,
is Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar, as coming into contact with
Chomsky's work had revived his earlier thinking on the possibility of musical universals.
Bernstein borrows Chomskian concepts in a liberal fashion for his first three lectures,
"Musical Phonology," "Musical Syntax," and "Musical Semantics;" of these, the latter two
are the talks most concerned with rhythmic issues. In "Musical Syntax," Bernstein discusses
processes of metrical deletion and expansion as transformations leading to an enriched,
poetic surface structure. He gives an extended comparison of how such processes, particularly
deletion, are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet no. 66 and the opening of Mozart's Symphony no. 40,
K. 550 to yield more interesting final products. In "Musical Semantics," Bernstein discusses
the use of various rhetorical figures of speech as further transformational devices to provide
emphasis and direction to phrases. He gives a fairly detailed analysis of the opening section
of the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, showing how the repetition of certain
motivic features to expand the phrase length can be viewed rhetorically.